As part of the Cognitive Search preview, the ability to extract information from unstructured files and the ability to execute cognitive skills were introduced in May 2018. This allowed you to extract images from unstructured documents such as PDFs and then enrich those documents through the execution of skills such as OCR, key phrase extraction, and named entity recognition to get more insights from your data. Until now, both skillset execution and the extraction of images from documents have been offered for free.

Starting December 21, 2018, you’ll be able to associate your Cognitive Services subscription with an Azure Search skillset. The skillset execution will be charged as part of the Cognitive Services subscription. On December 21, 2018, we’ll also begin charging for image extraction as part of our document-cracking stage. Text extraction from documents will continue to be offered at no additional cost.

The execution of built-in skills will be charged at the existing Cognitive Services pay-as-you go price. Image extraction pricing will be charged at preview pricing, and is described on the Azure Search pricing page. If you’re not currently using Cognitive Search capabilities as part of Azure Search, you shouldn’t be impacted by these price changes.